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Get out of the echo chamber!

If you’re trapped in the beltway echo chamber, whether in DC itself or you’ve just been watching too much CNN since you got snowed in, read this. Maybe it will wake you up. Read the whole thing here.

The wars? I was talking to the father of a warrior the other day. I dutifully expressed my respect for his son’s service and my sympathy for his father’s combination of pride and worry. But, coming from Dumb City, I had to ask myself silently and secretly during the conversation: why would anyone with half a brain coming from a well-to-do family have anything to do with these wars, that play like obscure passages from Gibbon? (A homeless guy here in town sold me all three volumes of Gibbon for $10 — what was I gonna do, turn the guy down?) We may be stupid here but we try to read stuff. We keep trying to understand WWI too because some of us down at the donut shop have the feeling that has something to do with this.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there are unincorporated towns in this county that will hit over 90 percent unemployment again this year. But most of those people are Mexicans and a lot of those Mexicans are not what people call Mexican-Americans. Congress and the Obama administration gave them a Christmas present this year: non-passage of the DREAM Act. So, there wasn’t much celebrating in the Bola Negra bars and pool halls around the Valley; but it sure was Christmas in the Castro District of San Francisco when the Senate repealed “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” But that was a middle-class issue, and to listen to the Democrats, there are only two classes, the upper and the middle. The rest of us are so “under” it is evidently politically incorrect to even mention us.